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368 pages, Hardcover
First published May 14, 2024
"Like the church, academic medicine has a moral mission that is protected by a complex set of orthodoxies and articles of faith. At the heart of this moral mission is medical research, the practice that is rewarded above all others. Research is what funds the enterprise, what launches faculty members up the hierarchy, and what distinguishes academic physicians from lesser doctors practicing in the community. To question the value of medical research is heresy. To expose its abuses is an act of treachery so grave that it will propel you headfirst into the mouth of Lucifer."
"I was looking for a moral justification for their actions, or at least an explanation. But eventually I came to understand that whistleblower narratives are not so much moral justifications as stories about the self. For whistleblowers, the decision to blow the whistle is a choice about the sort of person they are and the one they want to be. It’s not a matter of what should be done in the abstract. Sometimes it’s not even primarily about the consequences of the choice, although it can be. It is about the personal stakes of keeping quiet. More often than not, what torments whistleblowers is what their decision will reveal about them. They are worried a bout the state of their soul."
"Yet what sets these whistleblowers apart from bystanders is not simply that they saw moral wrongs for what they were. It is that speaking out about the abuses was a real possibility for them, an action it occurred to them to take. For many people, blowing the whistle is a thought that never enters the mind. When I look back at myself in medical school, what separates me from the person I was back then isn’t really a difference in moral perception. Even then I knew, deep down, that it was wrong to perform a pelvic exam on a non-consenting unconscious woman or attempt an invasive procedure that I was unqualified to perform simply because I was told to do it. What didn’t occur to me back then was the possibility of resistance."